Celebrity Homes

The Power of Colour

Tule Park is evangelical about the positive energy created by nature and colour. “The primal power of nature is something that we’ve lost, living in urban spaces,” she believes, “but it feeds your soul and sends you positive vibes.”

No surprise then that the west London homes she has worked on since becoming an interior designer are an uplifting mix of verdant hues and floral imagery.

Even during her 12-year stretch as an investment banker in Hong Kong and London, Park was aware that her creative right brain was just as active as her logical left brain. This she puts down in part to her early upbringing. The family left her birth place of the South Korean capital, Seoul, for a better life in Paraguay when she was six. There, her parents ran a clothing manufacturer, with her mother handling all the design work. “There were huge warehouses of fabrics all around me, so I grew up with colours, textures and patterns,” she says.

Despite the very different skills needed for banking and design, Park is convinced that her first career informs her current role as founder of Yellowhouse Design: “That experience was a fantastic boot camp for me, of discipline, focus and hard work.” She also applies some of the thinking associated with finance to her residential projects. She talks of “investing” in the home and asks how each space can “add value” to its occupants.

A major theme for her is understanding where the energy is in a house, and the relationship people have with the space they inhabit. She gives the example of a hall, normally brushed off as a mere passageway. “But by painting your hallway, you can turn it into something that’s bright or funky or shocking. That relays messages to the brain that add positive value to your interaction with the space.”

Instead of peddling a certain style, Park quizzes her clients about the feelings and emotions that they want to achieve. “I then translate that into colour and aesthetic.” And it is in that translation that nature plays an important role, appearing as real house plants or symbolically in murals as flora and fauna. Such imagery “sends strong signals to the brain and connects us to nature”, she says.

This bucolic exuberance runs counter to the usual safe approach that some Londoners take, particularly when they have an eye on a future sale. “Pastels and neutral tones have killed personality in our houses. That’s sad,” she says, adding that studies show “we would be spending a lot less money on psychiatry if we gave more attention to our environment.”

Her mission to empower people to embrace colour has been accomplished in a project in Brook Green. There, her starting point was a set of verdant Chinoiserie wall panels, which she chose to help link the living room at the rear of the house with the garden immediately beyond. The next connecting room was the kitchen, where she specified a “beautiful warm green” paint for the walls, which “connects with the mural without fighting it”. That in turn links to the dining room at the front of the house, which is painted in a modern green – more blue than yellow – as befitting the room’s period features. “When I first suggested a softer colour for the dining room, the client said: ‘We’re ready for something dark’.” A comment that obviously pleased her.

Meanwhile, in a Notting Hill townhouse Park has papered the dining room with Chinoiserie wallpaper. The idea was to “bring a bit of drama to a room that’s not used every day”. And on a functional level the dark tones coupled with two big teardrop pendants help focus the eye away from the room’s low ceiling.

Park is a huge fan of Chinoiserie wall coverings and likes to use them as a panel or accent, but she warns that “they are very stimulating, so you need to be careful in which space you surround yourself with all this nature”.

She is now turning her attention to a loft conversion, which will be rented out. “I’m excited, it will be so different from other rentals,” she says, insisting that she has no intention of reining in her colourful approach. “This is going to be everything but white and neutral,” she promises.